IT and Future Employment
EDITOR: George Strawn, gostrawn@gmail.com
F
or millions of years, pre-
humans and humans were
hunters and gatherers.
Then, for 10,000 years,
humans were farmers. Only 200
years ago, the human world began
transforming into an industrial
world. Already, the human world is
transforming again, into a post-in-
dustrial (possibly even a post-work)
world. In the farming world, almost
everyone was a member of a subsis-
tence-farm family. In the industrial
world, almost every man and many
women were factory or office work-
ers. It’s too soon to know what “al-
most everyone” will be in the post-
industrial world, but predictions
abound. This column will focus
on predictions about the future of
employment. Because this future
will be determined in large part by
IT-based products and services, IT
Professional seems like a good place
to consider these predictions.
Niels Bohr famously said, “Pre-
dictions are hard—especially about
the future.” This is certainly true
about the future of employment.
Moreover, any prediction about
this future can be interpreted as
being positive or negative, depend-
ing on the feelings of the predictor.
62 IT Pro January/February 2016 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1520-9202/16/$33.00 © 2016 IEEE
Automation
and Future
Unemployment
George Strawn
A goal of this column will be to
consider a wide range of both pre-
dictions and interpretations. Read-
ers are encouraged to submit their
opinions for publication.
In this article, I’ll consider the
prediction that IT and related tech-
nologies, such as robotics, are in
the early stages of bringing about
massive, systemic unemployment
(full disclosure: I believe this sce-
nario has a nontrivial probability
of happening later this century).
First, I will consider some issues
associated with making long-term
predictions. Then, I’ll identify
some recent books that make the
unemployment prediction and il-
lustrate it with one human activ-
ity that is about to be automated.
Finally, I’ll consider whether this
is a utopic or dystopic view of the
future.
“In the Long Run, We’re
All Dead”
Regardless of what John Maynard
Keynes meant by this famous quip,
many people take it to justify focus-
ing on the short term. Besides, many
predictions about the future are no-
toriously wrong. Since we have to
live in the present, the argument
goes, we should just focus on the
short term. For example, US busi-
ness focuses on the next two quar-
ters, and US politics on the next two
years. Even science is suspicious of
long-term predictions. Any scientist
who makes a prediction about what
will happen in two decades could be
accused of spouting science fiction.
Long-term predictions are not
only difficult to get correct, they
often predict scenarios that people
don’t like. Some business inter-
ests don’t like the prediction of
ecological collapse, and some who
are comfortable with the status
quo don’t like predictions of social
change. Thus, there are economic
and social reasons to argue against
any long-term prediction you don’t
like, regardless of its likelihood.
Because long-term predictions
only have likelihoods, a better
phrase to describe “predicting the
future” might be “analyzing future
scenarios.” In spite of disagree-
ments over likelihoods, thinking
about the future and analyzing
various scenarios could help keep
us from backing into the future.
Given that the future usually con-
tains buzz saws, backing in is never
a good idea.
Ned Ludd Redux?
In the early days of the industrial
revolution in England, when cot-
tage spinning and weaving were
being displaced by textile factories
(aka satanic mills), Ned Ludd re-
portedly destroyed some of the au-
tomated machinery. In the years
that followed, other disenfran-
chised textile workers followed
suit, calling themselves Luddites.
Ever since, people who resist any
automation have been called Lud-
dites. The rise of the textile in-
dustry was relatively quick1 and
might have been like throwing the
frog (Ned and his imitators) into
hot water. On the other hand, the
rise of the post-industrial world is
slower (or at least less visible), rais-
ing the water temperature a degree
at a time. For example, current
US unemployment (37 percent of
adults are not in the labor force
now compared to 33 percent in
2007) is widely interpreted as due
to causes other than automation,
such as workers voluntarily leav-
ing the labor force.2
However, in the past two years,
seven books (and probably oth-
ers that I haven’t read) have been
published warning about and pre-
dicting the systemic unemploy-
ment scenario. As an aside, only
one of these was written by a card-
carrying economist. It seems that
many economists hew to the party
line that capitalism has always de-
stroyed old jobs (creative destruc-
tion at work), but that it always
creates more new jobs than were
destroyed. In other words, past
performance is used to predict the
future.
The unemployment-predicting
books are The Second Machine Age
(Eric Byrnjolfsson and Andrew
McAfee, Norton, 2014); Average is
Over (Tyler Cowen, Dutton, 2014);
The Second Intelligent Species (Mar-
shall Brain, BYG Publishing, 2015);
Rise of the Robots (Martin Ford, Basic
Books, 2015); Surviving AI (Calum
computer.org/ITPro 
Chace, Three Cs, 2015); Humans
Need Not Apply (Jerry Kaplan, Yale
University Press, 2015); and Ma-
chines of Loving Grace (John Markoff,
Ecco, 2015). The authors are an
interesting assortment: Byrnjolfs-
son and McAfee are professors of
management at MIT who study
the economics of IT automation.
Cowen is a professor of economics
at George Mason University, where,
among his many interests, he stud-
ies public choice economics. Brain
is a computer scientist who, among
other things, created the How Stuff
Works website. Ford is a Silicon
Valley entrepreneur who has writ-
ten two books and several articles
on automation-related unemploy-
ment. Chase is a businessman
turned author. Kaplan is a Silicon
Valley entrepreneur and futurist,
and Markoff is a science and tech-
nology journalist.
If many jobs are automated, reducing the number
of hours in the work week could help spread the
remaining work and reduce unemployment.
As a special case, Cowen’s book
covers a shorter term and focuses
on IT-related underemployment.
He says that for the next several
decades, 30 percent of workers—
those who can work with the ma-
chines—will do well, but that 70
percent will be stuck in a down-
ward spiral (hence, “average is
over”). However, the other authors
are IT specialists of one stripe or
another and are quite aware of the
revolutionary advances current-
ly being made in IT and related
technologies that could radically
modify the employment picture.
I encourage interested readers to
pick up one or more of these books
and judge for yourself. They are all
good reads, and if you want a sug-
gestion, start with the most recent,
Humans Need Not Apply.
Utopia or Dystopia?
For one example of recent progress
in automation, consider “driverless
cars.” Navigating a car in heavy
traffic was, until recently, thought
to be too complex for computers,
but it is arguably now done more
reliably by a computer than by a
human. This probably means that
approximately 1.5 million truck
drivers and 200,000 taxi drivers
will be out of work in a couple of
decades. I speculate that it could
also mean that traffic deaths will
decrease from 30,000 a year to
3,000 once most cars are driverless.
By the way, the name “driverless
car” might come to sound as silly
as “horseless carriage” does today.
Moreover, car ownership might
disappear as “driverless Uber rides”
become ubiquitous.
This example illustrates the
pluses and minuses of automation.
If traffic deaths are cut to one tenth
of their present number, it would, of
course, be a great benefit for soci-
ety. And if calling for rides replaces
car ownership, a significant cost
savings for families could result.
On the other hand, don’t expect car
makers (or dealers or repair shops
or gas stations) to cheer, because
the total number of cars sold might
also be one tenth of today’s num-
bers. What about truck and taxi ex-
drivers and ex-car makers? There
might be nowhere for them to look
for a new job if most other job cate-
gories are also being automated out
of existence.
If many, but not most, jobs are
automated, perhaps reducing the
number of hours in the work week
could help spread the remaining
work and reduce unemployment.
63
 IT and Future Employment

Sweden is currently pursuing this their millions of years of hunting world/europe/sweden-introduces

policy.3 However, if or when most
jobs are automated, society would
face (at least) three big problems.
To quote Voltaire in Candide,
“Work saves us from three great
evils: boredom, vice, and need.” To
and gathering experience, will be
happy to get back to hunting, fish-
ing, and picking berries every day,
not just on weekends.
-six-hour-work-day-a6674646.html.
4. “Swiss to Vote on 2,500 Franc Basic
Income for Every Adult,” Reuters, 4
Oct. 2013; www.reuters.com/article/
2013/10/04/us-swiss-pay-idUSBRE
9930O620131004#SePoC7Qf36KY

accommodate need, some policy
makers see a guaranteed annual
income as a solution. Switzerland
is already considering this op-
tion;4 however, in the US, the very
thought raises cries of socialism.
Other more capitalistic policy re-
I
n sum, should this unemploy-
ment scenario come to pass,
policy makers will have as big a
job moving us to such a brave new
world as they did 200 years ago,
when they moved us from farms
to offices and factories.6
Be6G.97.
5. H. Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine
to Transcendent Mind, Oxford Univ.
Press, 1998.
6. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time, Beacon, 2001.

George Strawn is the former director of

Should this unemployment scenario come to pass, the National Coordination Office for the
policy makers will have as big a job moving us to Networking and Information Technol-
ogy Research and Development Program
such a brave new world as they did 200 years ago. ­(NITRD). He is now retired. Contact him
at gostrawn@gmail.com.

sponses include giving each citizen References

a stock and bond account. Perhaps
if or when business determines
that jobless consumers need cash
to continue buying their goods
and services, our mythology of
rugged individualism will be ad-
justed accordingly.
Assuming for the sake of argu-
ment that “need” could be relieved
by a guaranteed annual income
or some other policy, boredom
and vice might pose equally large
problems. Whether you were
one of the lucky ones who had a
meaningful career or one of those
who worked a meaningless job out
of necessity, once you’re out of a
job your “idle hands are the devil’s
workshop,” or so we are told by
various proverbs. However, there
are also optimistic views regard-
ing this possible future.
The ancient Athenians believed
that since their slaves performed
the required labors of society, they
were freed for the work of citizen-
ship. Perhaps our silicon slaves
could do likewise for us? Even more
utopi­cally, Hans Moravec wrote in
his book Robot 5 that our genes, with
1. S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New
History of Global Capitalism, Allen
Lane/Penguin, 2014.
2. M. Woolhouse, “Percentage of Those
in Labor Pool at 38-Year Low,” Bos-
ton Globe, 3 July 2015; https://www.
bostonglobe.com/business/2015/
07/02/percentage-workers-labor
-pool-falls-year-low/zfLQrKjCyhra
95v8PJxWcI/story.html.
3. H. Matharu, “Sweden Introduces Six- Selected CS articles and
Hour Work Day,” Independent, 1 Oct. columns are available for free at
2015; www.independent.co.uk/news/ http://ComputingNow.computer.org.
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64 IT Pro January/February 2016